The complex politics of lying

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John Howard told Australia what he sincerely believed about Iraq. But that is not enough, writes Robert Manne.

When the Flood report into the performance of Australian intelligence services was released last Thursday, John Howard found in it the definitive proof that, in leading Australia into war against Iraq, he had not lied. According to Howard, Flood had found that Australia's intelligence services generally accepted that the WMD threat was real.

In claiming that Iraq possessed a stockpile of WMD and that it posed a threat to its neighbours and the world, John Howard assured us that he had not deceived the people but told them what he truly believed. I do not doubt that this is so.

The question of lying in politics is, unfortunately, considerably more complicated than is generally supposed. To grasp the complexity, imagine, if you will, a political leader who has convinced himself for ideological reasons that Israel was responsible for the crime of September 11. Even if the belief was held with complete sincerity, this fact would not absolve our imagined political leader from the accusation that he had lied.

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It is not only the sincerity of a political conviction but also the integrity of the process by which the conviction has been reached that counts. In politics nothing is more common than the true believer whose lies are perfectly sincere.

How, then, is the emergence of the "sincere lie" on which the invasion of Iraq was based to be explained? Its origins are not found in Australia or Britain but in the United States, where in the mid-1990s a group of out of power Republican hawks - which included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz - decided to support a policy of regime change in Iraq.

There were many reasons why this group began to work for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. They wanted to finish what they thought of as the unfinished business of the first Gulf War; to place the vast oil reserves of Iraq into the hands of a friendly state; to allow US troop presence in Saudi Arabia to be reduced; to strengthen the strategic position of Israel; to create the model of a market democracy in the Middle East; to reduce the threat of rogue state possession of WMD.

With the election of George Bush in November 2000, this group moved into positions of power, dominating both the Pentagon and the office of the Vice-Presidency. Whether they could have found a way of removing Saddam Hussein in the absence of September 11 is unclear. What is clear, however, is that it was September 11 that provided them with their historic opportunity.

Within hours of the September 11 attacks the question of an invasion of Iraq was discussed at the highest level of the Bush Administration. A decision was postponed. By November 21, 2001, Bush commissioned a new war plan for Iraq. By the northern summer of 2002, the invasion of Iraq had already become a near-inevitability.

On the face of things, even after 9/11, a plausible case for war with Iraq was not easy to mount. Following the first Gulf War, Iraq's armed forces had been severely degraded. Its economy had been crippled by sanctions. Iraq was contained by US and British air power at the Gulf. It had lost control of its own Kurdish lands. It took considerable ingenuity to conjure from a state so weakened a clear and present danger to the United States and the world.

The hawks settled upon a two-pronged threat. They claimed, firstly, that since the first Gulf War, Iraq had illegally manufactured a vast arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and was within months of producing a nuclear bomb as well. They also claimed that solid evidence existed to show a secret alliance between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

As the brilliant first volume of the recently published US Senate inquiry into intelligence failure about Iraq reveals, during the mounting build-up to the war the US intelligence community helped to create a case about Iraq's WMD stockpile that, in almost every particular, either misconstrued or grossly exaggerated what the available evidence showed.

As the report also documents, although ferocious pressure was placed on the intelligence community by the Pentagon to accede to the case being mounted by the hawks about links between al-Qaeda and Iraq, on this question the intelligence officials would not budge.

Nothing is more common in ideologically driven politics than the triumph of conviction over evidence and reason. I have no reason to doubt that the Washington war party, in the grip of ideological self-intoxication, had come sincerely to believe in the seriousness of the supposed Iraqi threat. Within weeks of September 11 they had convinced the US President; within months they had convinced the governments of Britain and Australia.

How? I cannot pretend to understand the process by which Blair and his cabinet were converted to the reality of an Iraqi threat. On the other hand, the conversion of the Howard Government seems almost embarrassingly easy to explain.

On September 11 John Howard took personal control of Australian foreign policy. He followed from this moment one exceedingly simple idea, namely the importance of absolute loyalty to the United States. As in the Old Testament Book of Ruth, from this time wherever the US would go so would we; its policies would be our policies; its triumphs and disasters would be ours.

No one yet appears to have noticed a curious passage in last week's Flood report. According to Flood, the two main Australian intelligence bodies dealing with Iraq, the ONA and DIO, expressed scepticism about very many elements of the Anglo-American claims about Iraq - the attempted uranium purchase from Niger; the acquisition of aluminium tubes for a nuclear weapons program; the mobile biological weapons laboratories; the unmanned aircraft delivery system for WMD; the link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. These were not marginal issues: they were at the heart of the intelligence case for war. Even more startlingly, Flood reveals in passing that on the eve of the war, DIO even doubted that Iraq possessed a stockpile of WMD. Yet it was precisely because of the existence of this stockpile that Australia went to war.

These local intelligence doubts were clearly of no consequence for the Government. It was taking Australia to war not because of any indigenous intelligence assessment but out of loyalty to the alliance with the US. It was not just that their interests had become our interests; their arguments had become our arguments as well.

If in the US the sincere lie on which the invasion was based was grounded in neo-conservative ideology, in Australia it was grounded in something rather different - an unflinching and unthinking fidelity to a great and powerful friend.